But, the "data" part makes big data a focus of the storage industry. 2012 saw most of the first- and second-tier storage vendors do something about big data, typically announcing a relationship with Hadoop, the open-source developer of big data with the funny elephant logo, or a relationship with a software company that has a relationship with Hadoop.

Others, however, saw an opportunity due to the fact that Hadoop is limited in scalability, replication and many of the other features that are child's play to storage vendors, and so they focused on extending those features to big data.